Month: January 2013

Anyone who owns a touch screen device knows the difficulty of re-learning to type on a flat surface. We’ve resigned ourselves to the belief that tapping tiny buttons you can’t feel is the price we pay for the cool new technology parked in our pockets. The first week with my new phone had me convinced that my fingers were abnormally wide and would never be able to type a text message in less than five minutes.

I am happy to say that help is on the way. Earlier this month at CES 2013 , the Consumer Electronic Association’s international trade show, the folks at Tactus Technology offered a solution to the touch screen problem: a tactile user interface. In the demonstration video above, keys magically pop from the touch screen when the keyboard is needed and again become flat when the keyboard is hidden. The company’s website also offers a number of examples in which this technology can be used such as remote controls, gaming devices, medical displays, automobile interfaces, and more. Expect to see this technology on the market by the end of the year or early 2014.

Several years ago a friend and I visited the Case Western Reserve campus in Cleveland. We wanted an up-close look at the impossibly curvy Frank Gehry-designed building that houses the Weatherhead School of Management. We walked inside, outside, and all around the building taking photos and pointing out radical shapes and crazy angles to each other. The innovative structure thoroughly impressed us, and as it turns out, we are in good company. Recently the Cleveland Plain Dealer ran an article on the building and its connection to the Weatherhead School’s brand of unconventional creativity. One student observed, “When you think business, you think uptight, corporate suits. This building is not uptight. This is where the business world is heading.” Fred Collopy, a professor at the school, notes, “This building says it’s all right to be unique, different, and special. It says to students, ‘You don’t have to be like the manager in the next cubicle.’”

In the 1950s, biologist and doctor Jonas Salk took a much-needed break from his lab in Pittsburgh and spent a few months in Italy. He was deeply inspired by the peace and serenity of the 13th-century monastery that overlooks the town of Assisi. Refreshed, he returned to the US to continue his work and soon after developed a successful polio vaccine. He later built the Salk Institute so that it reflected the architectural rhythm of the monastery in Assisi.

A physical space effects how we think, feel, and create. What do your buildings say about you? Is your campus “on brand?”